Movie review: ‘Hustlers’ features strong acting but too much sleaze

Ed Symkus More Content Now

Wednesday

Sep 11, 2019 at 2:01 AM

As sordid, “based-on-fact” movies mixed in with a bit of humor go, “Hustlers” isn’t bad. It’s well written, competently directed, has a touch of a documentary-like feel to it, and the two lead performances - by Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez - are quite good.

The question is whether or not the subject matter will be of any interest to the general public. The story tells of a group of strip club dancers who made a pile of money catering to horny and wealthy and drunkenly generous Wall Street guys in 2007 New York City. When the 2008 financial roared in, and most of those guys lost their jobs, business in their strip club dried up. But entrepreneurial ideas among the strippers got cooking, and made a quartet of them more successful than they were before the crash.

That they weren’t exactly working within the limits of the law - no, you cannot legally target men, drug their drinks, get their financial information, or at least their signature on a credit card bill, and then fleece them - didn’t seem to matter to the dancers. If you read the exposé about the whole thing in New York Magazine, you know how it panned out.

That result won’t be revealed here because it’s more fun to find out what happened after going on the two-hour journey to that ending first. But it’s safe to say that the tale involves both pole- and lap dancing, lots of drinking - some of it drug-laced - loud music, weak-willed men, some of whom can fairly be labeled pigs, sharp and crafty women and various people making downright stupid decisions. It’s also about close friendships and some of the problems that can arise within them.

Young, beautiful, willing-to-learn Dorothy (Constance Wu) who takes the stage name Destiny when she starts working at one of those Wall Street worker hangouts, where lunchbreaks for the men in suits turn into leering sessions and the tossing of hundred dollar bills once the dancing gets more lurid. As the “new girl” there, she’s taken under the wing of veteran - but still hot - dancer Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), and learns the ropes, and the pole, quickly.

There are lots of other women dancing on the various stages, and rejoicing in the camaraderie of dressing rooms antics, but the film’s focus stays on Destiny and Ramona. They work together as student and teacher, they sometimes dance together in front of those boozy Wall Streeters, and they become friends, each with complicated but fairly happy home lives.

The structure of the film has it regularly cutting between their story being played out, and a New York Magazine journalist named Elizabeth (Julia Stiles) interviewing Destiny for an after-the-fact piece about what happened.

What happened was, after the crash, the dancers still had to pay bills and live life, so the savvy Ramona came up with a way to lure “customers” into the club, where that fleecing would take place. Some solid acting from Wu convincingly shows how her concern for the men whose lives they might be ruining takes shape, while great acting chops from Lopez makes us believe that pure greed led to her not seeing to what degree she was hurting her victims.

Running from 2007 through 2015, the film presents a realistic atmosphere of the club scene and makes clear how easy it was to fall under spell of materialism without being concerned about the consequences heaped upon others.

Some of this is fun, but the film isn’t by any means, as IMDB labels it, a “comedy-crime-drama.” There’s certainly nothing funny about the situation of either the desperate and mostly thoughtless women or the ogling men. There’s no sex involved here, just a lot of expensive teasing - at least in this version of the story. Neither is there anyone to root for, not even the comparatively innocent Dorothy/Destiny.

While the film’s denouement, involving cops closing in, offers some excitement, the climax is flat and kind of a letdown. The story serves as a cautionary tale, but it just may be one that people don’t want to learn about.

Ed Symkus writes about movies for More Content Now. He can be reached at esymkus@rcn.com.